She dealt with her problem with alcohol while it was still in an incipient state.

WILLY [stopping the incipient argument, to HAPPY]:

Arthur Miller -- Death of a Salesman

Smasher, the incipient shepherd—

John Steinbeck -- The Red Pony

At a tender age he had developed mange, or leprosy, or some other such infantile disease, and had lost all his hair, never to recover it — a tragedy which may have had a bearing on the fact that, when I knew him, he had already devoted fifteen years of his life to a study of the relationship between summer molt and incipient narcissism in pocket gophers.

Farley Mowat -- Never Cry Wolf

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I hadn’t eaten anything yet that day, because of the sticking temperature and the crabbed feeling of an incipient illness, which I knew was due partly to my shock at events of the previous night, as well as the anticipation of this present moment, which should be nothing at all for an experienced medic but was unnerving all the same.

Chang-rae Lee -- A Gesture Life

And at that very instant, with the dramatic convenience which the incipient novelist in me rather appreciated, her suddenly transformed face seemed almost drowned in. the blackest shadow, cast there by one of those fat, oddly tinted clouds that briefly obscured the sun and touched us with an autumnal chill.

William Styron -- Sophie’s Choice

I look at our hands, her smooth one, the nails pale moons, mine with its tattered cuticles, its skin of incipient toad.

Margaret Atwood -- Cat’s Eye

Looking at Louie, whose getaway speed was his saving grace, Pete thought he saw the same incipient talent.

Laura Hillenbrand -- Unbroken

Okonkwo’s first son, Nwoye, was then twelve years old but was already causing his father great anxiety for his incipient laziness.

Chinua Achebe -- Things Fall Apart

It was now the season of incipient preparation for dinner.

Harriet Beecher Stowe -- Uncle Tom’s Cabin

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’Let me go to bed, then,’ answered the boy, shrinking from Catherine’s salute; and he put his fingers to remove incipient tears.

Emily Bronte -- Wuthering Heights

The shock and the incipient pain had partly sobered him.

James Joyce -- Dubliners

This bore some resemblance to incipient rigour, and was accompanied by a marked sinking of the pulse.

Robert Louis Stevenson -- Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

It appeared to me that the eggs from which young Insurers were hatched were incubated in dust and heat, like the eggs of ostriches, judging from the places to which those incipient giants repaired on a Monday morning.

Charles Dickens -- Great Expectations

When he removed his boots he discovered incipient frostbite on several toes.

Jon Krakauer -- Into Thin Air

WHEN TWO MEN LIVE TOGETHER they usually maintain a kind of shabby neatness out of incipient rage at each other.

John Steinbeck -- East of Eden

It is more than probable that, in the disordered state of his thoughts, he would soon have fallen into some suspicious, if not fatal, error had not his incipient attempts been interrupted by a fierce growl from the quadruped.

James Fenimore Cooper -- The Last of the Mohicans

Sometimes I grew alarmed at the wreck I perceived that I had become; the energy of my purpose alone sustained me: my labours would soon end, and I believed that exercise and amusement would then drive away incipient disease; and I promised myself both of these when my creation should be complete.

Mary Shelley -- Frankenstein

Do we not wile away moments of inanity or fatigued waiting by repeating some trivial movement or sound, until the repetition has bred a want, which is incipient habit?

George Eliot -- Silas Marner

For the first time she recognized the symptoms of infatuation which she had felt incipiently as a child, as a girl in her earliest teens, and later as a young woman.

Kate Chopin -- The Awakening

On the piteous spectacle of the pair spending their evenings in shorthand schools and polytechnic classes, learning bookkeeping and typewriting with incipient junior clerks, male and female, from the elementary schools, let me not dwell.

George Bernard Shaw -- Pygmalion

An incipient fuzz appeared on his upper lip.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez -- One Hundred Years of Solitude

But part of that incipient racism had always led whites to assume the leadership positions and perpetuated the view that whites rather than blacks were the heroes of the movement.

John Howard Griffin -- Black Like Me

Hugh Miller gave something which resembled an incipient smile.

Robert Penn Warren -- All the King’s Men

Thus the incipient attachment was stifled down.

Thomas Hardy -- The Mayor of Casterbridge

There is nothing so inspiring in life as the sight of a legitimate ambition, no matter how incipient.

Theodore Dreiser -- Sister Carrie

Now and then, in the eagerness of dispatching pressing business, I would inadvertently summon Bartleby, in a short, rapid tone, to put his finger, say, on the incipient tie of a bit of red tape with which I was about compressing some papers.

Herman Melville -- Bartleby, the Scrivener: a Story of Wall Street

In this respect, it seemed to me, his incipient clinic was already a success.

Tracy Kidder -- Strength in What Remains

The incipient panic that had started a few hours earlier had driven them to the brittle edge of riot.

Tom Clancy -- The Hunt for Red October

The area was located in the San Gabriel Valley, which for years consisted of incipient industry, farmland and migrant camps until Los Angeles stretched out fingers of suburban sprawl to the furthest reaches of the valley.

Luis J. Rodriguez -- Always Running

And the water, because of incipient flooding, wasn’t safe to drink when we got there.

Tracy Kidder -- Mountains Beyond Mountains

Let us hope that all her previous guilt may be attributed to the incipient workings of this frightful malady.

Margaret Atwood -- Alias Grace

Holgrave gazed at her, as he rolled up his manuscript, and recognized an incipient stage of that curious psychological condition which, as he had himself told Phoebe, he possessed more than an ordinary faculty of producing.

Nathaniel Hawthorne -- The House of the Seven Gables

His eye became a degree less opaque: it was as though an incipient film had been removed from it, and she felt the pride of a skilful operator.

Edith Wharton -- The House of Mirth

They represented qualities that she felt and despised in herself—incipient meanness, conceit, cowardice, and petty dishonesty.

F. Scott Fitzgerald -- This Side of Paradise

His incipient friendship with her aunt had been nipped by the failure of his suit, and all that Oak learnt of Bathsheba’s movements was done indirectly.

Thomas Hardy -- Far from the Madding Crowd

Yet it was not exactly the solicitude of an incipient father.

William Faulkner -- Light in August

I will have to trust that there is enough incipient activity in and from the tesla trees even during the quiet periods.

Dan Simmons -- Hyperion

When Carlotta heard of the astounding reception bestowed upon her understudy, she was at once cured of an incipient attack of bronchitis and a bad fit of sulking against the management and lost the slightest inclination to shirk her duties.

Gaston Leroux -- The Phantom of the Opera

They floated in his mind agreeably enough, and as he took up his bed-candle his lips were curled with that incipient smile which is apt to accompany agreeable recollections.

George Eliot -- Middlemarch

Old female relations with incipient beards and several wobbling chins made overnight trips to Ayemenem to commiserate with her about her divorce.

Arundhati Roy -- The God of Small Things

Next it was asked of him whether he knew of or suspected aught savoring of incipient trouble (meaning mutiny, tho’ the explicit term was avoided) going on in any section of the ship’s company.

Herman Melville -- Billy Budd

What had become of all her ardours, her aspirations, her theories, her high estimate of her independence and her incipient conviction that she should never marry?

Henry James -- The Portrait of a Lady - Volumes 1 & 2

An indescribable lightness of heel served to lift him along; and Jude, the incipient scholar, prospective D.D., professor, bishop, or what not, felt himself honoured and glorified by the condescension of this handsome country wench in agreeing to take a walk with him in her Sunday frock and ribbons.

Thomas Hardy -- Jude the Obscure

He made Kaethe Gregorovius feel charming, meanwhile becoming increasingly restless at the all-pervading cauliflower—simultaneously hating himself too for this incipience of he knew not what superficiality.

F. Scott Fitzgerald -- Tender is the Night

The whole secret of following these incipient paths, when there was not light enough in the atmosphere to show a turnpike-road, lay in the development of the sense of touch in the feet, which comes with years of night-rambling in little-trodden spots.

Thomas Hardy -- The Return of the Native

He bethought him of his mother, whose homely vestments he remembered to have seen hanging on pegs like those which he felt must belong to Hetty Hutter; and he bethought himself of a sister, whose incipient and native taste for finery had exhibited itself somewhat in the manner of that of Judith, though necessarily in a less degree.

James Fenimore Cooper -- The Deerslayer

In fact, Miss Knag had conceived an incipient affection for Kate Nickleby, after witnessing her failure that morning, and this short conversation with her superior increased the favourable prepossession to a most surprising extent; which was the more remarkable, as when she first scanned that young lady’s face and figure, she had entertained certain inward misgivings that they would never agree.

Charles Dickens -- Nicholas Nickleby

In my incipient craziness, a knot in the tree resembled the head of a man.